Xaverian’s lack of clutching hitting is becoming a concern after it led to a second-straight loss.
The Clippers baseball team stranded 11 runners in a 3–2, eight-inning loss to host Archbishop Molloy in Brooklyn-Queens play on April 22. Molloy tied the score at 2–2 in the sixth, but Xaverian left the bases loaded in the top of the seventh and wasted a leadoff triple by Louis Mandile in the eight.
“We had out opportunities, once again,” senior shortstop Phoenix Hernandez said. “We have seniors on the team. There is no one else to blame but us. We have to some through in those type of situations.”
The Stanners (5–3) eventually won the game on a line-drive single to left center by Ruben Jimenez, which plated Liam Coen in the bottom of the eighth. Cohen stroked a one-out double against Alex Passarella, who tossed just more than two innings of relief.
Xavieran, which already owns a win over Molloy, missed an opportunity to put the Stanners into a big whole early. It scratched just one run in the first inning on a Daniel Ryan single but left the bases loaded with two outs. The Clippers squad, which was 7–0 in league play coming in, managed 11 hits and stole five bases — but it scored just one more run in the sixth thanks to a Christian Allegretti RBI-single to make it 2–0.
“We are not scoring enough runs early to give our pitchers a little bit of breathing room,” Xaverian coach Frank Del George said. “Every pitch is important now, every pitch gets magnified.”
He was pleased with the job his hurlers did for the most part — outside of the nine walks and two hit batters they allowed. Starter Frank Allegretti did not allow a hit through four innings, and reliever Nick DeSalvo threw a perfect fifth before getting into trouble in the sixth.
Molloy opened the frame with its first two hits of the game. Then, a walk to Jack Turner loaded the bases. Passarella came and gave up an RBI single to Billy Hatzinikolaou and hit Mike Cortez with a pitch to force home a run that tied the score at 2–2. He was able to keep the game even, but the Clippers’ bats fell quiet against Stanners reliever Yanni Orfanidis.
“You feel like we got one in the first, maybe we’ll get a couple in the second and third,” Hernandez said. “It just didn’t work out that way.”
Del George and his coaches had a long talk with their club after the game — long after Molloy left the field. He wanted to get his players’ minds straight with the race of the division crown tightening.
“It’s going to be a dogfight all the way to the end,” Del George said. “These guys thought it was going to be breeze. They don’t realize the season is fairly long and there are pretty good teams in our division.”
